Carbon dating shows ancient Egypt’s rapid expansion

Early Egypt might have been ruled by individual kings, some of their names are inscribed on the Palermo Stone

(Image: courtesy of the Petrie Museum, UCL)

The powerful civilisation of ancient Egypt took just a few centuries to build, according to a radiocarbon dating study that sets the first solid chronology for the period.

Five thousand years ago, Egypt became the world’s first territorial state with strict borders, organised religion, centralised administration and intensive agriculture. It lasted for millennia and set a template that countries still follow today.

Archaeologists have assumed it developed gradually from the pastoral communities that preceded it, but physicist Mike Dee from the University of Oxford and his colleagues now suggest that the transition could have taken as little as 600 years.

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The early history of ancient Egypt is murky because although there are plenty of archaeological finds, including royal tombs, there is no reliable way to attribute firm dates to the various reigns and periods. Radiocarbon dating has previously been of limited use because dating individual objects gives ranges of up to 300 years.

To improve on that, Dee and his colleagues used a computerised statistical approach known as Bayesian modelling. They compiled radiocarbon dates from nearly 200 artefacts, including hair, plants and bone, from known reigns or periods during Egypt’s First Dynasty and the Predynastic period before it. They entered these into a computer model to estimate the most likely dates of transition between the different periods.

It is illegal to remove archaeological samples from Egypt, so the researchers dated items from museum collections in Europe and North America, as well as freshly excavated seed samples from Tell es-Sakan on the Gaza Strip, which was an outpost of ancient Egypt.

The first king

For the First Dynasty, the estimated reign lengths match the human lifespan, which was around 30 to 40 years at the time. This suggests that Egypt was ruled by individual kings right from the start, rather than by clans, as some experts have suggested. The researchers used carbon dating to estimate with 68 per cent probability that the first ruler, King Aha, took to the throne between 3111 and 3045 BC, and died between 3073 and 3036 BC.

They also concluded that the Predynastic period began in 3800-3700 BC, so it lasted just 600-700 years, several centuries less than previously thought. “This is a period during which Egypt goes through a major transition,” says Dee. It started with small, cattle-owning communities who migrated with the seasons. “At the end you’ve got a state.”

“All the important things that our societies do were invented then,” says Günter Dreyer who, until recently, was the director of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo, and has led excavations at Abydos, one of ancient Egypt’s oldest cities, for more than 30 years. “We’re still standing on their shoulders.”

He is sceptical about the accuracy of radiocarbon measurements when it comes to absolute dates, but agrees the technique gives a valuable indication of the lengths of different historical periods. During the Predynastic period, progress “becomes faster and faster, so much happens”, he says. “In the last two centuries, around 3200 BC, it is breathtaking.”